In the long history of evolution it has not been necessary for man to understand multi-loop nonlinear feedback systems until very recent historical times. Evolutionary processes have not given us the mental skill needed to properly interpret the dynamic behavior of the systems of which we have now become a part.

J. W. Forrester, 1971

Sunday, September 18, 2016

Mark Twain is credited with popularizing the saying, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” I wonder under what category of lies Twain would lump Donald Trump's lies. I imagine he'd have to come up with a whole new "genre" to accommodate Trump's epic litany of fabrications, frauds, fakery, and phantasmagoria.

Republicans have been surprisingly successful painting Hillary Clinton as “a liar,” while turning a blind eye to their candidate’s bizarre travels through fantasy land. I've asked myself, "Why?" and I've decided it's because no one really expects Donald Trump to tell the truth. Apparently Trump equates being truthful with being "political correct," and we know well what he thinks about political correctness.

Let’s be honest, for a change, Hillary Clinton has lied. But to paraphrase Yogi Berra, half the lies they tell about Clinton lying aren’t true. Where she has bent the truth, she’s admitted it; awkwardly perhaps, e.g., “I short-circuited,” but she’s come clean. Not Donald Trump. He lies and then doubles down, belittling whoever has the temerity to challenge him.

What’s worse, Donald Trump lies to bamboozle, to swindle, to cheat. Often, the people he’s victimized are society’s most vulnerable — people down on their luck striving to get ahead, small businessmen working 80-hour weeks to build an enterprise.

Donald Trump is one of those people the writer Jose’ N Harris was talking about when he wrote, “Those who lie, twist life so that it looks tasty to the lazy, brilliant to the ignorant, and powerful to the weak.”

A week or so ago, Hillary Clinton said one "could be grossly generalistic" and put half of Donald Trump’s supporters in a “basket of deplorables,” people driven by “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic" sentiments. She later walked that back a little -- maybe it wasn't half.

At the risk of being politically incorrect myself, I say it could be at least half if we add the lazy, ignorant, and weak-kneed people who make up another large segment of what is certainly a deplorable "basket" of the American voting public.

Donald Trump is a horrible person, and is grossly unqualified to be president. He is, as former Defense Secretary Bob Gates recently said, “willfully ignorant about the rest of the world, about our military and its capabilities, and about government itself.” But what's truly distressing to me is that so many Americans support him. I thought we were collectively better than that. Where the hell have I been all these years?

Friday, September 9, 2016

According to coverage by the the Washington Post and other news outlets, Donald Trump shrugged at a past comment that he knew more about the Islamic
State than America’s generals, disparaged those generals by saying
they'd been “reduced to rubble,” suggested that his plan to defeat the
Islamic State — long something he said was a secret — would instead be
formulated with help from top generals and, ultimately, casually
indicated that he might just fire most of the generals anyway.

The men Donald Trump disparages are among the military's finest, with more medals between them than could fit on Donald Trump's entire pudgy body. This after Trump said that John McCain was no hero because he'd been captured. "I like people who weren't captured," the man said who took four deferments for college, and then another "medical deferment" (for bad feet) upon graduation.

Trump's bragged about how much he loves veterans; so much that he skipped the RNC convention to run a fund raiser for vets. He said he raised almost $6 million, but it then turned out he didn't give it to the veterans' charitable organizations -- not until the media found out he'd stiffed the vets and called him out on it.

I'm a retired U.S. Air Force officer. If I were still in the military and Donald Trump were elected president, I would resign my commission and leave the service. I would never, ever accept Donald Trump as my Commander-in-Chief.

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

The feigned outrage over the Clinton Foundation by republican operatives, now given rude voice by Donald Trump, is the height of hypocrisy, but most people won’t realize this.

“Never heard of it.” This was a response I got all too often as I went door-to-door as a volunteer collecting signatures for I-735, a grassroots movement to make Washington the 18th state to ask Congress to overturn Citizens United. It was disheartening to learn that so many people knew so little about something so important.

The Supreme Court’s 5-4 decision in the 2010 Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission (FEC), gave corporations and unions the right to spend unlimited sums to call for the election or defeat of individual candidates. It’s the “corporations are people, too” decision, as Mitt Romney referred to it in his 2012 bid for the Presidency.

Citizens United overturned decades of campaign finance law, most particularly the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (BCRA) aka, the McCain-Feingold Act. The hotly-debated decision threw open the floodgates on campaign spending and opened a Pandora’s Box of other challenges to campaign financing based on Citizens United arguments.

Ostensibly, it is still illegal for corporations or labor unions to give money directly to candidates for federal office. The court said that because these funds were not being spent “in coordination” with a campaign, they “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” The absurd naivety of this statement has been hilariously parodied by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central. Former FEC Chairman, Trevor Potter, appearing with Colbert helped demonstrate how current campaign laws spawned PACs, and Super PACs and “social welfare organizations,” designed to circumvent this remaining restriction, and to hide their donors from public scrutiny.

If I asked you which of our two major political parties was behind the campaign finance law challenges that led to this wild west of election financing, my guess is that you’d answer, “the Republican Party,” and you’d be right. Google the names ‘James Bopp,’ and ‘Shuan McCutcheon’ for background.

Bopp

McCutcheon

What’s ironic is that the Clinton Foundation, much maligned by republicans, is a 501(c)(3), i.e., a non-profit charitable organization. As such, it is not permitted to engage in political activity, endorse or oppose political candidates, or donate money or time to political campaigns. There’s no evidence that the Clinton Foundation does this, despite all the fulminating.

On the other hand, 501(c)(4) organizations, the so-called “social welfare organizations,” like the Koch Brothers ‘Americas for Prosperity,’ can do all of the above. And they do. And they do not disclose their donors. The Clinton Foundation does.

If you want to clean up the current mess we call campaign financing, a good place to start would be a “Yes” vote on I-735. Google it.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

No third Party candidate has ever won a US POTUS election except
George Washington (he ran as a non-partisan Independent and won by a massive landslide as the Greatest Hero of the new Nation -- his opponent
may have voted for him.

A so-called realignment election has only occurred once in history when
the Republican (GOP) came into existence in 1856. The GOP supplanted
the withering Whig Party, but lost the general election to the
Democrats. In the next cycle, Lincoln was elected as the first
Republican President and the Whig Party vanished into history. Nearly
immediately, the Civil War began in response to Lincoln's progressive
platform. Republicans were progressive and Democrats were conservative
from 1856 to roughly 1930.

Then the great swap began that reversed the
Party' positions, completing during the Civil Rights era in the 1960s. A
second realignment election almost occurred in 1912 when Theodore
Roosevelt, running as a "Progressive Party" candidate, challenged Big
Bill Taft (R) and Woodrow Wilson (D). Although he beat Taft soundly,
Wilson still won the election by plurality putting an unpopular
President in the White House (he became more popular thereafter). The new "Bull
Moose" or "Progressive" Party faded away quickly after the defeat and
estrangement of Roosevelt from the GOP. The GOP bounced back and
remains to this day.

Some context about that fractious 1912
race, that entirely split the Republicans, is quite instructive given
today's circumstances. Theodore Roosevelt was arguably the most popular
POTUS in US history, other than George Washington up to that point (and
likely to this day).

Roosevelt bolted the GOP after feeling
disenfranchised by his own Party's nominating process (there was rampant corruption in the nomination process a century ago that would make
electioneering hijinks today look like a microbe). When he won every
open primary voting State and lost every closed caucus State, TR
declared that the GOP was corrupted and trying to steal the nomination.
It was rather blatant given the lack of transparency in the caucuses
back then -- his defeat of Taft demonstrated that the nomination process
was entirely corrupted, it was not a conspiracy theory.

Recall that a
mere 4 years earlier, TR had voluntarily not run for a third consecutive
term as a matter of principle -- he had campaigned for Taft but felt
his policies were betrayed during Taft's Administration. TR ran as an
Independent and crushed Taft -- the second time a third Party candidate
displaced one of the main Party nominees from the top two. Woodrow
Wilson won by plurality and the Democrats took the WH.

The
historical lesson is that even the second most popular politician in
American history, tested as a two-term President, a Vice President,
Governor of NY State, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Political
Appointee to the Civil Service Commission (under both Parties),
President of the NYC Police Commissioners, promoter of the "Muckrakers,"
Dakota cowboy and ranch owner, writer of a huge pile of scientific
literature on natural history and military history and strategy (a
scholar), war hero (he quit his political career to join the military
when the Spanish American War broke out -- he led the famed "Rough
Riders" Calvary Unit composed of many cowboys that he knew from the
Dakotas), a brilliant orator, adventurer and explorer.

Even this person, who was a household name,
an American legend in his own time, could not win a third Party run,
even though he survived an assassination attempt while on the campaign
trail. He was shot at point blank range in the chest, but his folded up
stump speech and eye glasses case slowed the bullet down enough to keep
it from puncturing his lung. The press went wild. America's hero has
taken a bullet in the chest and simply stood back up and said, "Strong
as a bull moose," and walked off stage. Now that's Presidential behavior!
The history reads like some astonishing novel -- like the basis of a
Greek myth.

So... what's the probability that largely unknowns
have any chance of getting more than a few percent of the vote? ZERO! I
know that's a tough history lesson to accept, but unfortunately, it's
entirely true so don't fall for it. Have personal fortitude to accept
reality and understand that third party voting for a President is what
"useful fools" do in our electoral process.

If you look closely,
what third party candidates do today is what they did back then. They
put unpopular people in the WH by splitting popular sentiment. It's not
hard to find examples since the list is reasonably long. This is
particularly true when the margin of popular sentiment is less than 5%.

A glaring recent example is that Al Gore wasn't beaten by Dubya Bush,
he was beaten by idealists (useful fools) who "voted their conscience"
when they voted for Ralph Nader -- a left wing challenger. Nader picked
up 2% and that was enough to put Dubya over the top. Dubya lost the national popular vote, but his contested win in Florida by a little over
100 votes, gave him Florida's winner take all Electoral College vote,
and he won the Presidency.

The man was a fool and created a foreign
policy disaster that killed thousands of Americans, wounded tens of
thousands, and exploded the deficit by simultaneously expanding
entitlement benefits (for a GOP constituency) and starting two wars (one
unjustified), while massively cutting taxes. He destroyed our
reputation overseas and it's taken 8 years to make headway against all
the damage he did to our foreign policy. Trump is ten times the fool
that Dubya was and entirely unqualified to be President having never
held any elected office. He's a crooked realtor for God's sake!

The right wing media spin and smear machine (both sides have one)
is simultaneously promoting a two-pronged approach: 1) a false
equivalence campaign, linked to 2) encouraging undecideds to either not
vote, or to vote third party. Why?

Donald Trump is an obvious
disaster and a clear and present danger to the country, but culture
warriors and right wing (vs center right) conservatives would rather the
country take that risk (falsely believing they can control Trump's
idiotic behavior) than risk Hillary making court appointments that could
have decades of impact on their anti-progressive agenda. They're also
trying to limit or destroy any coattails Hillary may have down-ballot in
the event that she wins. They hate the Donald, but he's their
narcissistic dangerous idiot since they nominated him. What to do?

Well...hmmm. Hillary has this amazing superpower of projecting
unlikability (whatever that is) and elitism on TV. It's like some kind
of intrinsic property that seems to ooze from her pores. Her impressive resume seems unable to paint over it -- it just keeps seeping through.
The right wing spin meisters figure they can hold show trials and witch
hunts, at taxpayer expense if possible, even though they have always
ended in smoke but never fire, and then they can blow that smoke up the
public's arshole by combining it with consistent messaging using words
like "liar, liar, pantsuit and cankles on fire!" Heck, they've got a
long lead on this since they've been pursing this strategy since the
90's (and before).

They've got her type cast like an old-time Hollywood
actress. They've worked with diligence to turn Hillary's media persona
into the Jungian archetypes of the "devil" and the "trickster" rather
than the "wise old woman" or "hero", and her lack of "photogenics" and
so-called "shrill voice" play right into their strategy. Let's be fair,
her voice isn't really shrill, she's an alto and it's quite strong,
rather than soprano and wispy. The real issue is that she's assertive
and she tends to speak in active voice using imperatives, like men in
leadership typically do -- this is a challenge to misogynists who don't
like women who make demands and presume to be "uppity".

Then all they
have to do to exploit this "dislike" campaign they've been fertilizing
with BS for decades, is to constantly compare her to the Donald as
somehow basically being equal choices: both are "horrible" or "bad and
worse", depending on the audience. This is the false equivalence campaign that they're executing this with amazingly powerful
effectiveness and coordination. They've leveraged TV and media messaging
into millions of people parroting this like robots. They've even
dispatched additional FOX News-like "fembots" as spokespersons to try
and blunt expected losses among women, while boosting the misogynistic
voters, who get turned on by the sight of dangerous and dominant "beauties"
(sort of a lite-weight version of bikini-clad super models with machine
guns).

How does this help their cause? Well, the Donald is loved
only by a minority (sizable, which is scary) of potential voters with a
statistical center that's populist, bigoted, anti-establishment, under
educated, angry, white, male, older, can be motivated by flimsy culture
war arguments, can overlook blatant lying and exaggeration when done by
orange men with terrible hair and small hands, like to watch dominatrix films
in private -- fill in other ugly descriptors here. In a big country,
that's a lot of people that are very energized by fear, hate and anger,
but far from enough to win the general election. Those voters won't
abandon Trump no matter what outrageous thing he says. Like he said, "I
love the uneducated" and "I could shoot someone on 5th Ave and not lose
support." Given his cult following, how is the GOP to make up the deficit? Two
ways...

First, encourage discouraged people not to vote. Second,
encourage other discouraged people to vote third party. Trump "owns" his
base (this is a unique sort of right-wing populist base, not the
traditional GOP base). Hillary's base is broad and fractious and is much
less tightly bound to their nominee (Hillary's personality cult is
incredibly small and Donald's is comparably "Yuuuge" -- that's all he's
really got in those tiny grasping orange hands). The media based spin
and smear campaign being executed by the right, as described above, is
partly aimed at the centrists and leftists in Hillary's base, in
addition to maintaining the right wing base by "identifying their common
enemy" through the process of "branding" that I described above.
Discouraging people from voting by saying that both candidates are
horrible or bad and worse, removes more voters from Hillary than from
Trump (he benefits) since her base is less tightly bound to her.

Encouraging third party voting benefits Trump as well. Why? Because the
only two very modestly visible third party runs include the Green Party
(the decidedly leftist party of Ralph Nader) and a Libertarian ticket
that is sort of center right with a few liberal elements in the social
agenda. Any vote for the Green Party is one less vote for Hillary (this
is obvious since they're a left wing challenge, just like Nader was to
Al Gore when Nader helped the Republicans secure the Presidency by
trimming the Democrat's polls from the left).

More of the votes for the
center right Libertarians remove votes from Hillary because she's making
a huge effort to "capture the middle" and because of their few liberal
positions. Moreover, many of the people in the middle are former or
disenfranchised establishment Republicans (that have been relabeled
RINOs by the new populist "Freedom Caucus") who can't yet bring
themselves to jump ship and vote for their traditional "enemy." This
also slightly helps or is at worst neutral for Trump -- several polls
have been performed that demonstrate this effect in the range of a
couple percent or so.

It's sad, but this is both deeply cynical
AND true AND nothing new. That there has been no reform of the electoral
process to require top two runoffs in the absence of a popular simple
majority for a single candidate (50%+ for a single candidate) is clear
evidence that both of the main Parties are happy to game elections this
way and like to keep the option open to overturn popular national
sentiment through third party challenges that split the popular side.
This is a power game the main Parties regularly play and the country
suffers for it.

Third Parties should have sufficient ethics to see this
game is being played and to constantly call for electoral reform so that
they're not "being used" to spoil their own stated agendas. If it
looks like they cannot get near the top of the ballot, they ought to
bow out and lend their votes to the party with nearest interest (this is
why coalition parliamentary government has some advantages). I figure
they must be highly ideological, ambitious or an intentional foil to
continue forward under current circumstances.

Theodore Roosevelt
made the reasonable wager that if anyone could overturn main party
dominance, it would be the most popular and well-loved president up to
that point (not including George Washington, who was atypical). Even he
was wrong and that lesson has already been painfully learned,
historically speaking. Unfortunately, the voting public has a
statistically significant portion that seems incapable of learning from
history and they get used and the country gets abused over and over by
flimflam artists in both Parties.

Just say "we won't be fooled
again!" hold your nose if you must, and vote for Hillary Clinton. The
only way to fix the right wing is to send them packing in a big and
undeniable way.
_________________________________Jon Phillips is a Senior Nuclear
Technology Expert at the International Atomic Energy Agency and
Director, Sustainable Nuclear Power Initiative at Pacific Northwest
National Laboratory. The opinions expressed here are his own.

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So long and thanks for all the fish

So long and thanks for all the fish
So sad that it should come to this
We tried to warn you all but oh dear?

You may not share our intellect
Which might explain your disrespect
For all the natural wonders that
grow around you

So long, so long and thanks
for all the fish

The world's about to be destroyed
There's no point getting all annoyed
Lie back and let the planet dissolve

Despite those nets of tuna fleets
We thought that most of you were sweet

So long, so long, so long and thanks for all the fish

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984, ISBN 0-345-39183-7) is the fourth book of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tetralogy written by Douglas Adams. Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspatial express route.

Blog Author

Richard Badalamente earned his BS in Aeronautical Engineering from the University of Southern California and MS–Human Factors and PhD-Behavioral Science from Texas Tech. He is an author at http://tinyurl.com/pakn8el